‘Not a day goes by when I don’t regret what I did’

Paying the price

Tony Saxon/Mercury staff

Former Guelph Storm defenceman Lucas Nehrling, 32, sits in the visiting room at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston Thursday, July 26, 2012. Nehrling is looking to get his life back on track after overcoming an addiction to prescription pills and a total of 42 criminal charges.

Backintheday

Philip Walker/Record file photo

Lucas Nehrling checks Kitchener Rangers forward Darren Mortier during a game in Kitchener February 2, 1999.

NHLprospect

Submitted photo

Lucas Nehrling was a tough, stay-at-home defenceman and legitimate NHL prospect when he suited up for the Guelph Storm in the 1998-1999 season.

KINGSTON — It didn’t take long for former Guelph Storm defenceman Lucas Nehrling to go from National Hockey League prospect to drug-addicted criminal.

The road to redemption will be much longer.

Nehrling, who also played in the Ontario Hockey League with Sarnia and Kingston, is sitting in the visitation room at Kingston’s Collins Bay Institution, four months shy of parole eligibility for a 42-charge crime spree that included burglary, drug possession and assault.

“I was basically a hockey player for 23 years and a criminal for 16 months,” says Nehrling, 32, speaking openly about his downward spiral.

“Not a day goes by when I don’t regret what I did,” he says, leaning his 6-foot-5, 245-pound frame back on a plastic chair.

Talk is cheap, particularly when you’re on the wrong side of 30-foot prison walls topped with razor wire, but Nehrling says he is a changed man.

Prison has helped him kick a prescription drug addiction that consumed eight years of his life and he says he is ready to make amends for all the harm he has done: to strangers, to loved ones and to himself.

“I 100 per cent accept responsibility for my actions. I feel sorry for those people. I know one day I’m going to do better things. Part of my recovery is to make amends in certain situations and that’s definitely a goal of mine.”

After 20 months in jail, Nehrling is eligible for parole on Dec. 12 and his statutory release date is July 25, 2013. He will be on parole for two years following his release.

Nehrling was a stay-at-home defenceman with a serious shot at making the big leagues when he patrolled the Guelph Storm blueline in the 1998-99 season. Big, strong and tough, he had his best year in the OHL, totalling five goals, 14 assists and 131 penalty minutes.

He graduated from Our Lady of Lourdes high school and billeted with local police officer Doug Pflug, who doubles as the Storm’s fitness coach.

“He was like a son to me,” Pflug says. “He was very caring and very focused. He came into my home and worked his rear-end off to finish high school.”

Pflug says he plans on reaching out to Nehrling and offering support as he manages his addiction.

“I believe the kid that came into my house 12 years ago and worked so hard to make something of himself is still there,” says Pflug, who has stayed in touch with Nehrling’s sister.

“If he can put that effort into managing his addiction, and stay 100 per cent sober, I think Lucas will definitely be a success in life.”

Nehrling says the year in Guelph was one of his favourites in hockey.

“That whole year, the organization, Doug, the school, it was great. I loved my time in Guelph.”

Nehrling grew up in Marmora, just outside Peterborough, his mother Polish and his father Ojibwa from nearby Curve Lake First Nation. The surname Nehrling comes from a stepfather.

His parents had an on-again, off-again relationship and it was his mother, Janice, who primarily raised Lucas and his older sister, Cloud, driving the pair to countless hockey games and practices, first in Marmora then, as Lucas started climbing the competitive ladder, an hour away to Belleville two or three nights a week.

“She used to wear a button on her coat that said ‘#1 Hockey Mom,’ ” Nehrling remembers. “She was amazing. We were close, extremely close. Me and my sister were my mom’s whole life.”

It was the loss of his mother in 2009 that Nehrling says fuelled many of his bad decisions.

“The day she died, he was supposed to come to the hospital to see her and he didn’t,” his sister remembers. “I think there was a lot of guilt with that and how he handled her illness in general.”

Life wasn’t always so hard.

At 16, Nehrling was drafted by the Ontario Hockey League’s Sarnia Sting.

“I never even knew where Sarnia was when I got drafted there,” he says. “I was just a small-town kid who never thought about hockey as anything other than fun.”

Homesick at first, he kept phoning his mom who would tell him to give it a month, and if he still felt the same way she’d come and get him. But he settled in and started enjoying a three-year OHL career that would see him traded to the Kingston Frontenacs, then the Storm.

“Those were the good times. Where you never really worry about money or stuff like that, you’re just playing because you loved it,” Nehrling says.

His agent, Scott Norwood, flew the Nehrling family to Pittsburgh for the 1997 NHL draft, where Lucas was taken in the fourth round by the New Jersey Devils. He signed his first NHL contract two weeks later.

Hockey quickly stopped just being fun. Over the next three years he would bounce around to five minor league teams, including four teams in the 1999-2000 season.

“I learned that hockey was a business. It was a real eye opener,” he says of his pro career. “It’s about big dollars and you realize you’re a commodity.”

In the summer of 2002, feeling like he was stuck behind several other top prospects in the Devils’ system, he turned down a new contract and was preparing to impress other teams with a solid year in the United Hockey League. But a week before training camp was scheduled to start, the Ford Explorer he was driving along a rain-slicked road on the Curve Lake First Nation slid across the centre line and hit a school bus head on.

Nehrling’s left leg was shattered, along with his dream of a professional hockey career.

“I remember the doctor coming in and telling me I’d never play hockey again. That was hard,” he says. “For years after my car accident I couldn’t watch hockey, I couldn’t talk about hockey, I couldn’t even think about hockey.”

After the crash, Nehrling spent the next three months on a couch, popping prescription pain killers to mask the pain in his leg that was held together by four screws and a metal plate.

It was the beginning of a downward spiral. Addicted to OxyContin and Percocet, nothing else really mattered.

“I was feeling really sorry for myself and painkillers became my outlet to escape reality. Without hockey, I lost my identity so I turned to drugs.”

Nehrling says the pills numbed both body and mind.

“It’s crazy how fast it can happen and how it makes you just dull and not care about what’s going on around you. They took full control of my life. They controlled every thought.”

Nehrling says for three and a half years he was prescribed pain killers by his doctor.

“It got to the point they didn’t even ask me if I was in pain anymore. I’d just go in there (the doctor’s office) and in two seconds they’d say ‘do you want your prescription?’ ”

A healthy insurance settlement from the car accident helped pay for the pill habit that Nehrling says was costing him about $1,000 a month.

Cloud, who at one point took a chunk of her brother’s money for safe keeping, says Lucas was burning through the cash and committing some offences.

But both agree that Lucas really hit the skids when their mom died.

“I had a lot of guilt with how I’d dealt with my mom’s sickness and her death and I kind of lost all hope. I just totally isolated myself and started committing crimes,” Nehrling says.

If his life wasn’t a mess already, it was now.

“If drugs weren’t in control of my life before this happened, it was 100 per cent lost after she died. Things just went to the next level.”

He was arrested for a spree of break-and-enters in Eastern Ontario during the fall of 2009. While out on bail for initial charges, he committed more break-ins.

“I got a rush from it,” he says. “Things got so bad I was a time-bomb. . . . You find yourself hanging around with people that don’t have any goals and you fit right in with them.”

In and out of jail, the big blow came at Christmas of 2010 while he was in North Bay to attend an outpatient drug rehab program. Living at a halfway house and just six days from completing his first sentence, Nehrling got high on cocaine and pain killers and went to a North Bay home looking to collect money and drugs. He ended up in a fight with the homeowner, whose daughter was asleep upstairs.

The result was charges of assault and being unlawfully in a dwelling. Nehrling pleaded guilty and was given a 21-month prison term on top of two years he had been given for the break-and-enters.

That brings us to Kingston and a spare interview room, with flaky walls the colour of day-old mustard, in Collins Bay Institution. Nehrling has dropped 30 pounds since he entered the medium-security facility. With cropped black hair and a youthful gait, he looks more hockey player than convict on this July day.

He has lost a lot, including his father, Wayne, who passed away from a heart attack last year, just five days after visiting his son in jail. Perhaps losing so much, and the guilt that comes with it, has helped Nehrling realize how important it is to make the most of what he still has.

The highlights of his days at Collins Bay are bi-weekly visits from Cloud and her 10-year-old daughter, Rayna.

Every day he attends meetings under the National Substance Abuse Program and he says he is clean.

He is also embracing his Ojibwa culture, speaking regularly with an elder who visits from Curve Lake First Nation. He has started drumming and singing with other First Nation inmates.

The illness of addiction is a lifelong battle, and he knows it.

“I know the statistics say that most inmates in a federal penitentiary re-offend. But I know this is it for me, without a doubt,” he says.

Nehrling wants to go back to school, become a counsellor and try to turn all the wrong things and wrong choices into something positive.

Single and without children, Nehrling says there are a lot of people that haven’t given up on him, despite what he’s done. Perhaps most importantly, he hasn’t given up on himself.

“I’ve done a lot more good in my life than bad and I know I can do even more good. For the first time in a long time I feel good about myself.”

If he gets parole in December he will head to a halfway house. After that, his sister says he can live with her as long as he stays “on the right track.”

Cloud hopes, prays and thinks her brother is capable of changing.

“Of course I’m worried. It scares me. So many people can’t do it,” she says. “But he’s strong. He’s succeeded in the past, he had the ambition and drive to be a professional hockey player and that shows what he’s capable of.

“I know he can do it and he’s very serious about it, but in the end it comes down to him.”